“What did you tell her?” Cougar asked, passing him a shot of yellow rum.
“Thanks.” Nat took the rum and downed it in one gulp. “I told her she was mad! You can’t go changing a person’s name just like that. Or a mountain’s either. A name’s a legacy. You can’t change your legacy. What if I started calling myself Herbert? Or Gene? You wouldn’t know who I was.” He slammed his empty shot glass onto the bar for emphasis.
“Gene Gentle, huh?” Raoul mused. “That’s not so bad, you know.” (Gentle was Nat’s last name.)
“How about you, Raoul?” Cougar suggested. “Gene Orlean is even better.”
Raoul and Cougar laughed and clunked drinks high in the air.
“Have your fun,” Nat went on. “All I’m saying is a Gentle is a Gentle and an Orlean is an Orlean. A name grows up with a person. Or a mountain. Give me another rum, will you?”
Cougar poured, Nat pored over the paper, and Raoul drummed his fingers on the bar.
“Where’s Bang?” Raoul inquired, his high spirits making him more in want of company and of nonsense than he had been since I first came into the world.
As if in response to Raoul’s wishes, Bang appeared in the Belly’s doorway. He wore a blue beret and carried a fishing rod and knocked the latter against the former in salutation as he neared his buddies at the bar.
“What’s it going to be tonight, then? Songs of zee swordfish?” Raoul teased.
“You’re in a good mood.” Bang maneuvered his pole over the bar and into a corner. “Am I to assume you haven’t seen the Morning Crier today?” He snatched the paper from Nat and read aloud:
For the second time in ten days, two acres’ worth of pineapples have gone mysteriously missing from the plantation of Cyrus Puymute. The crops disappeared overnight, seemingly without a trace. Police investigations are ongoing, though the earlier case was dismissed for lack of evidence and deemed supernatural. The Office of Customs and Excise will continue to investigate in an attempt to recover lost duty on the apparently-exported fruit.
“You seem too happy to have read that,” Bang declared. “Not that I’m complaining to find you in a good mood, mind you.”
“Oh, I’ve read it alright. I’ve read it,” Raoul replied.
“And?” Bang looked at him.
“And what?”
“And you aren’t upset about all this magic business you can never seem to stomach? This is black magic if ever there was any. That’s four acres now that are gone. As if in a puff of smoke.” (Bang’s hands opened into the starbursts that he always circled in front of his face whenever he discussed Oh’s black magical manifestations.)
Raoul just giggled and shook his head.
Bang looked at Cougar, with whom he exchanged a helpless shrug. “Fireflies,” they said in unison.
You see, whenever Raoul giggled and shook his head it meant trouble. It meant that his usual flies had transformed themselves into bright ideas, bright ideas that like fireflies in a lidded jar would knock about inside his brain until they were freed into the clarity beyond the glass, or until they burned out and died. Like Raoul’s everyday flies, his fireflies, too, came in every size. There were small ones, say, a short-cut that got him faster to work in the mornings or a cup that kept his pencils from rolling off his desk. There were medium-sized ones: a TV antenna fastened to his roof, an irrigation system for the garden in the back of his house. And then there were the biggest and the brightest ideas, like newspaper ads about babies, and now, evidently, a plan to nab a pineapple thief.
“Out with it, Raoul. What have you got in there?” Nat knocked on Raoul’s forehead.
Raoul, his high spirits making him more tolerant, too, of company and of nonsense than he had been since I first came into the world, started to explain about Stan Kalpi and the singing wind, about the mandolin-guitar and Stan’s toes doing maths in the mud, about his own variables—the notebook, the bookmark, the balm and the shoe—lined up on the table at the Pritchard T. Lullo Public Library. He was barely at the part about the soft plum, when Bang, convinced he had cottoned on to the Stan Kalpi maths, excitedly interjected that the plum must mean someone was hungry. While Bang, Nat, and Cougar debated whether the someone were Raoul or Gustave or the phantom of Puymute’s patch, Raoul, somewhat less tolerant than a few minutes before, took back his paper and returned to his quiet sipping, smirking, and study.
The three might have debated all night about the solution’s next logical step had Cougar not noticed the filling Belly and the darkening sky and reminded Bang of the time.
“Hey, you never did say what you’re singing about tonight,” Raoul said, happy to hear that the subject had changed.
Bang bounced onto his feet and raised his waterglass to Raoul, Cougar, and Nat. “Tonight, gentlemen, I sing about friends.”
“Friends?” Nat repeated, confused. “What do you mean you sing about friends?”
“Friends. You know. Mates. Chums. Good friends. Bad friends. Honest friends. Cheating friends.”
“Cheating friends?” Raoul marveled. “What kind of friends are those?”
But Bang was already on stage and didn’t hear Raoul’s question.
“Ladies and gentlemen. Good evening and welcome to the Buddha’s Belly. My name is Bang and tonight we’re going to do some numbers for you inspired by friendship, which we have lots of on this pretty little island of Oh. So find yourselves a friend to sit next to, get yourselves something from the bar…” (He winked his usual wink at Cougar.) “…and enjoy the show.”
Who do I turn to when I need to know
Bang’s voice, announced by the soft, humid tones of the marimba, was met with the usual reverent, if temporary, silence that it garnered every night when it calmed the Belly’s rumblings. Amid whispered orders for tonics and rums (which tasted more forbidden for the sottovoce with which they were requested), the customers tried not to shuffle or cough or scrape their chairs against the floor. Raoul re-read his paper. Cougar tended bar. Nat lit the daily cigar he bummed from Cougar’s cache.
Like the bold dinner jackets, silk foulards, and calfskin shoes that Cougar has flown in to the island for himself, so too are his cigars of the choicest quality. Nat could never have afforded them on his own, at least not yet, and as he let the rich perfume fill his mouth, to the accompaniment of Bang’s homage to friendship, the full worth of Cougar’s friendship—and Nat’s dependency on it for good cigars and a second or third or even a fourth round of rum—struck him acutely and painfully.
Someone’s there when I’m feeling low?
Normally Nat wasn’t bothered by his flimsy financial affairs. For if Bang was born with the gift of gab and song, Cougar with luck and charm, and Raoul with brains and heart, Nat was blessed with that pliability that was the stuff of Oh’s Abigail Davies’s and its Alejandro Creeks. It mattered not to him that his once-wealthy family had chewed up its fortune without so much as spitting out a few seeds for him to live on, a kerchief of land for him to plant or a marimba fashioned of mahogany and polished gourds. He was happy to be able to pay for fish and vegetables and gasoline, to afford a t-shirt at the market and at least one daily nip. There were many islanders who considered him a rather wealthy man, in fact, for many islanders had never even seen a rainbow bill or eaten a vegetable they hadn’t planted and harvested themselves.
Someone who will hold my hand
But lately Nat had grown as restless as the sea that dissolved Oh’s sandy shores. He wanted to go to movies and to travel, to take a day off now and then, and to maybe find a wife. A wife, he knew, would never be satisfied with market-day t-shirts and a diet wanting of beef, a fact that added to Nat’s malaise. Money matters were something he knew little about, having had such little money all his life, so he found himself faced with a problem whose very solution was contrary to everything he thought or did.
When my eyes are blinded by the blowing sand.
Back to Cougar’s fancy cigars. They had special appeal for Nat on this night
that was drawing him into melancholy rumination about friendships and hardships and the solution’s next logical step. They were the same cigars Nat’s grandfather had smoked when Nat was just a little boy, running and hiding in the acres of leaves taller than he that spread across the Gentle plantation like a green-gold sea. Had Cougar changed brands? Surely Nat hadn’t been smoking these very same cigars all along, oblivious to the scent of his childhood and his past? Either way, fact of the matter is, on the night in question, like Mr. Stan Kalpi drawn home by the smells of wet leather and oniony stew, Nat let the cigar’s perfume and Bang’s affectionate songs carry him back to a richer, happier time.
Where would I be without your shoulder
He remembered his grandfather’s birthday parties, the one luxury (in addition to expensive cigars) that the plantation owner allowed himself all year. Though his family benefited greatly from his riches, he himself was happiest knee-deep in the foliage that populated his pineapple patches, provided he had taken a morning’s bowl of hot porridge and an evening’s bowl awaited him on the stove. Except, of course, on April 27th.
On April 27th of any given year, Henry (that was Nat’s grandfather’s name, Henry) did not don his overalls and breakfast on gooey mush. Rather he wore a dark green jacket with a tie of black and white diagonal stripes, and from early morning, breakfast-less, he supervised the set-up of tents and tables and bandstands and balloons. By noon the guests would start to arrive (practically all of Oh was invited) and while the children played cricket and lawn tennis the adults drank and smoked and discussed the current state of affairs. Late in the afternoon, just before dinner was served, the guests were given kites, which they all flew at once, a tangled explosion of painted and dotted diamonds that lit up the sky in Henry’s honor.
To lean upon as I grow older?
Dinner followed the kite-flying: breadfruit roasted over open fires, green pumpkin soup, barrels of pork and swordfish stew, steamed lobsters, crunchy corncobs, salads of papaya and fig, and coconuts full of soft jelly or rum. Music followed the dinner: steel drums and marimba, mandolin and guitar, love songs, dance songs, traditional ballads. Just the sort of party the grown-up Bang would have loved, Nat thought, but like Nat, Bang was just a boy when the money ran out and the tradition of Henry Gentle’s birthday parties stopped.
To brace me in my time of need
Bang’s accidental intrusion into Nat’s reminiscing jerked Nat back to the Belly and away from the confusion of sweating dancers and dragging kite strings and discarded rinds of coconut. Around him the clientele was only just beginning to make noise again, Bang’s voice still prevailing over the cheerful, restrained din. Nat closed his eyes and breathed in the smoke that drifted from his cigar and hovered in front of him before climbing to wrap itself around the blades of the ceiling fans that dispersed it. Like a dreamer who wakes from a vague and pleasant dream, and struggles to return to it, Nat tried to get back to the field where the music played and dancers leaned in closer as night fell, where his grandfather’s cigar smoke enveloped him as he sat on the old man’s lap. But the field was too far away.
Or when I face a mighty deed.
“Hey Raoul, you remember those parties my grandfather had when we were kids?”
Raoul looked up from his paper. “Sure,” he said. “Hard to forget those. Once I ended up with a kite as tall as I was.”
“What was tall as you were?” Cougar asked. He had just finished preparing a dry martini and joined the conversation late.
“A kite I got once at one of those parties Henry Gentle used to give. Remember those?”
“Yeah, ’course. Haven’t thought about old Henry in years,” Cougar said.
“Me neither.” Raoul motioned for a refill. “Not in years.” And back he went to his paper.
Nat turned on his stool to face the stage. When was the last time he had thought—really thought—about his grandfather? he wondered. Ah, yes! he smiled to himself and nodded his head. Edda’s twelfth birthday…so, some eight years ago. At Captain Bowles’ beach.
Why should I wake with the sun every day
What Nat refers to as Captain Bowles’ beach never really did belong to Captain Bowles; Oh’s bays and beaches belong to everybody and anybody who happens to find himself (or herself) on one of them. But Captain Bowles had built the big house on top of the hill overlooking this particular beach, and so “Captain Bowles’ beach” it was called. The house, which the captain built almost forty years before this night in which we find ourselves intruding on Nat’s private thoughts, was host to some of the greatest and most famous minds of the captain’s day, his own being among them. In fact, to call it simply a “big house” is to diminish the grandeur of the once mansion-cum-salon, though it seems a suitable label now, the house long having fallen into abandonment and ruin.
The story of Captain Bowles, who he was and how he arrived on Oh, belongs between covers of its own. Suffice it to say that he was one of the few outsiders, maybe the only one, who managed to easily needle his way into the fabric of the history and lore with which the islanders inadvertently cloaked themselves, despite the fact that his individual thread stood out in the weave. Captain Bowles put Oh on the map, as they say, at least for a little while, for which the islanders were mostly grateful. But his story has a sad ending, and after it, back off the map Oh quietly fell.
If not so I might see your face?
It was indeed eight years before, at Captain Bowles’ beach, or, rather, at the house that Captain Bowles built, where Nat had last thought about his grandfather in the company of a twelve-year old Edda. It was her birthday, and Raoul and Cougar had charged Nat with taking her for a long walk while, along with Tripper the cook, they prepared her a birthday surprise at the Sincero. Nat and Edda had meandered along the beaches of Oh’s southern coast when Nat suggested that from Captain Bowles’ beach they make the climb up to the big, deserted house. With typical twelve-year old zeal, Edda charged up the hillside, anxious to reach the decrepit building that loomed above her like a haunted house from a fairy tale. Nat, following behind, watched her against the light of the sun, an aubergine cut-out, flat and curved at once. He admired the silhouette that lay decidedly at the end of his path, barely recognizing the feline princess warrior whose outlines were those of a young woman.
My faith and my friend, from now till the end,
When they reached the house, Edda ran through its gutted insides, which were scattered with debris that betrayed the splendor the house once was: chipped and faded moldings along ceilings and floors and windows, a broken chandelier that lay crooked in a corner, rubble of cracked white marble that in younger days must have withstood the tangos and waltzes of only the most fashionable and expensive of shoes. While Edda explored, Nat sat on the rocky edge of the hill and looked down at the buildings of pink and yellow and beige that dotted Oh’s landscape, wrapped in a white-sand ribbon that was tugged at by the sea. Just beyond the cluster of pastels that marked the center of town, Nat spotted what used to be his family’s land, and knowing that back at the Sincero a birthday fete awaited, he was reminded of the parties that the plantation once saw. When Edda came out of the house, she and Nat sat close together on the precipice, and he told her all about them in the shadow of the withered mansion. Nat didn’t realize it then, but now as his mind replayed that birthday of Edda’s through the filter of time, it fell upon him like one of the island’s weighty fruits: Nat was no different than Captain Bowles’ big house, a product of great wealth, but now broke, empty, and abandoned.
Poor Nat. He realized then that in eight years little had changed. Alone at the Belly, with no date, no dance-partner, and no prospect for either, he drank donated rum and puffed on a borrowed cigar.
My comfort, my refuge, my grace.
My faith and my friend, from now till the end,
While Nat brooded, a satisfied Gustave sat at one of the tables that rested in the sand beyond the Belly’s propped-open door. Without realizing it, he had been
doing a little Stan Kalpi maths of his own, for in the lined-up variables that he pulled from his desk drawers that day he needed a match (you remember: seashell, bandage, walnut, keys), the solution’s next logical step had suggested itself. If the islanders and the excisemen wanted to believe that he was responsible for everything on Oh, from Edda’s baby to illicit exports, then let them! He would give them a magic show they would never forget, pull out all the stops like he pulled all the junk from his desk. He would see to it that more and more acres disappeared, and worse, if necessary (so said the fishhook), until the islanders were so afraid of him that they would finally leave him alone (like the dead bug did).
My comfort, my refuge, my grace.
His elbow on the small round table that tilted into the beach, Gustave leaned into his fist and let his thumb caress the talisman he had carried his whole life, like you or I might rub a rabbit’s foot or a lucky penny, or a wise man his long white beard. With a smug smile, and in higher spirits than he had been since first I came along, Gustave smoothed the soft blond down that blanketed the blotch on his cheek, though he was feeling little in need of luck just then.
My faith and my friend, from now till the end,
For Gustave now had help. The three marbles, two days before, had reminded him of that.
My comfort, my refuge, my grace.
Behind the bar Cougar leaned silently against the wall of bottles, somewhat more ruffled than at the evening’s start, though it would seem odd to attribute this to the talk of friendship and pleasant childhood memories. Raoul still leaned over the Morning Crier looking for hints and clues, certain that once Gustave was cornered for one crime, he would finally confess to another. (In other words, the only mysterious crop Raoul was really interested in explaining was his own little almond.) Nat, Nat sat melancholy, torn up over and confused about his money problems—and even more torn as to their solution.
Left at the Mango Tree Page 12
